Archive for October 28, 2007

I was away from Xanga for quite a while. I mean, I would post every so often, when I had the time and was in the mood, but I it was just post and split–go back to work or to J-dorama or whatever. But I’ve been back now for about that past couple of weeks and I began to realize that Xanga has changed quite a bit. The new layout with modules makes it easier to set up a nice looking page, so I asked about a week ago if I should give my site a face lift. But to a man–and woman, of course–everyone said that my site was fine he way it was.

Sammy: Personally, I think your site is fine. It’s like a trusted brand name, so no reason to change!

Whonose: Don’t change the look, I like the way this looks, stylish and minimalist!

Okay, I get the picture. Actually, I’ve always liked the way my site looks. Duh! I guess that’s why I designed it that way. Images are nice, and so are colors, but to me a blog is a journal and a journal is a journal is a journal. It is for me, textual in nature and the best way to present text is black print on a white background. This reminds me of a story.

On the front of the store, there hung a huge sign that said “Coffee”. There was neither a store name, nor a catchy phrase. On a white background in black, simply COFFEE, that was all. It was also tilted a little bit upward to boot, so it looked just like a letter of challenge facing the sky.

Why anyone would go to the trouble of putting up such a sign was beyond me. The position of the sign was way too high for people walking on the street to catch a glimpse of, and the letters were too big as well. That I notice the sign was due to nothing more than the lucky coincidence of looking up meaninglessly at the sky from the the window of the car per chance at that moment.

We were on the road home from an outing, and were dead tired. My friend who had his hand on the wheel yawned every twenty seconds, and his girlfriend was fast asleep next to him. The ashtray was full, and from the car stereo flowed a Temptations’ song about the difference in temperature between February and May.

“Coffee,” I read out loud.

“Coffee?” my friend said.

“There was a sign that had Coffee written on it”

“Signs like that are everywhere.”

“But on a sign as big as six tatami mats, it simply had Coffee written on it, and it was facing toward the sky,” I objected.

“Bomber repellent,” he said after a yawn. “It’s something like the mark of the Red Cross. No one would do something like bomb a coffee shop. Am I wrong?”

“I guess not,” I said.

So text–as Murakami Haruki suggests in his short story “Coffee”–is open to interpretation. Even something as mundane as a sign with the single word “coffee” can be interpreted subjectively by anyone. I mean, bomber repellant? Hahahahahah. But the key here for me is what identifies text as text: Black letters on a white background.

But back to the original point. I couldn’t help myself. I still had to try the new module based Xanga layout. Everyone else seemed to have such cool looking sites, and I didn’t want to be left out, missing the bus, marginalized. So this is what I came up with!

o-man philosophy

We are the sum total of our own individual experiences. As a result, everything we think, say, and interpret is tainted. While we may try to offer objective “facts”, these facts are arranged and presented through the prism of our own experiences. As such every memory we recall, every event we interpret is our own subjective perspective of the truth.